Cartoonist Tony Reeve and I were both mad fans of Patrick McGoohan's legendary television show, The Prisoner, and it was entirely because of the show that we first met.

Much of The Prisoner was filmed in and around the idyllic private village/hotel of Portmeirion in North Wales. It was the life's work of the groundbreaking Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who was a pioneer of planned communities, an early voice for conservation and the National Trust, and a saviour of spectacular architecture. During the middle part of the Twentieth Century, Clough purchased, received, rescued, and relocated numerous pieces of beautiful, important, or whimsical architecture — ranging from a statue of Atlas to an entire classical town hall with plaster bas-relief ceiling — and resurrected them among the quiet trees and rhododendrons of Portmeirion. Noel Coward was a fan of the place and wrote his masterpiece, Blithe Spirit, there. McGoohan filmed a few episodes of his earlier TV series Danger Man (known as Secret Agent in the US) at Portmeirion, and then used it as the primary location for The Prisoner, which just added to the show's mysterious and moody atmosphere.

Portmeirion is a listed site of architectural and historical importance, which means it remains preserved in a state virtually idetical to when The Prisoner was filmed there in the late 1960s. As a result, fans going to a Prisoner convention can dress up in costume, recreate favorite scenes from the show, and generally immerse themselves in the actual and magical place where it all happened. It would be like Star Wars fans being able to hold a convention in Mos Eisley Spaceport.

I met Tony Reeve at Portmeirion in the late 1980s. I was walking up to the Town Hall (which doubled as a pub) one evening and noticed some friends talking to a very tall fellow. At the time, I was working in the comics industry in New York City and one of my pals said: "Hey Geoff, did you know that Tony here is also a cartoonist?"

I asked him to tell me more but he politely and shyly declined several times, gently insisting that I could not possibly have heard of his work. I pressed back, gently as well, until he admitted that he drew "a little strip" called P-Nuts, which was a parody of The Prisoner executed in a vaguely Charles Schultz-like style. P-Nuts was one of my favorite strips of the era and when I blurted out: "Wait ... are you the Tony Reeve?!" he looked a bit shy, and was convinced someone had put me up to the whole thing as a prank. And Tony was a bit shy at times. He was also overly tall, and boney, in a Joey Ramone way. He had a really big chin and a pockmarked face, and I guess nobody could ever claim that he was handsome in a conventional way, but he was very striking, brilliant, extremely funny, and made fun of his awkward body in a way that made him even more endearing to his friends. As if that wasn't enough, poor old Tony had a bad heart, terrible eyesight, and other health problems, which he chose to joke about, rather than complain.

After my mother died in the late 1990s, my regular trips from New York back to the London of my youth became less frequent. My brother, Andrew, also left home for the States and then my father relocated to Ireland. I lost touch with most of the people I had grown up with, but Tony steadfastly remained one of only two close friends that I always made a special effort to see whenever I returned to England. Tony loved cinema, art, science fiction, comics, and could always be counted on to go with me, at no notice, to any new and entirely off-the-wall, avant-garde art exhibition ... or opening night of the latest Cronenberg film. The weirder, the better as far as he was concrned. Tony visited me in the States as well. We had many adventures in Manhattan and he was equally entertaining on either side of the Atlantic — a quietly irreverent intellectual of the first order.

Tony was well known as a political cartoonist in the UK and was published by Private Eye, Punch, The Spectator, and The Independent among others. He was interested in everything and was one of the few people in my entire life with whom I could simply talk for hours without getting bored or distracted. He kept up with every facet of local politics (as a satirical cartoonist I suppose he had to) and had plenty of opinions about what was wrong with the British Government, the way in which London was managed, and the arts scene, and he didn't mind sharing those opinions in a humorous, sophisticated, and vaguely anti-establisment manner, which is just one of many reasons we got along so well.

Money was always a bit tight for Tony, but somehow he managed to do that most difficult and desirable of all bohemian things — make a living solely as an actual cartoonist. It's the one dream that all boys share at some point in their lives. Well, that and astronauts. And Tony with that terrible eyesight of his, which made his succes even more incredible — much like a mechanic running a busy service station / garage with two broken hands.

Tony also met venerable Welsh character actor Kenneth Griffith (The Prisoner, Four Weddings and A Funeral, The Englishmen) at a Prisoner convention. He and Ken became friends and, eventually, housemates. Tony rented the top floor of Ken's townhouse and put his cartooning studio up there. Whenever I'd call to make plans with Tony, it was surreal and slightly jarring to have the great Kenneth Griffith personally answer the telephone in a highly proper manner. I was a fan — a big fan — and Ken was always working so I always had something new to say, like: "Ken, it was great to see you in the new episode of Lovejoy last week." To which he'd answer: "Oh, bless you, dear boy!"

Tony's best story was about the night Ken yelled upstairs for him to come down from the studio and explain how to do something in the kitchen. When Tony shuffled in, no doubt stooping slightly to fit himself through the regular-human-sized doorway, he discovered a brightly intoxicated Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris sitting at the table with Ken, pounding down whisky, and demanding that hot food be served. "And so, I showed a plastered O'Toole, Harris, and Kenneth Griffith how to roast a chicken. And I was completely sober."

As his crippled heart continued to degenerate, Tony had a pacemaker installed. He told me he was surprised by how loud it was, ticking away inside him. He also told me that he could continue to drink alcohol, but had to inform the surgeon before the operation precisely how much alcohol he intended to consume. And then have exactly that amount — no more and no less — each and every day forever. Rather sensibly, I thought, Tony opted for none at all. But, of course, there was another guy having a similar operation on the same day who elected to have his pacemaker calibrated with the obligation to consume five pints of strong British ale every night for the rest of his life. There often seemed to be someone like that, traveling on a track very nearly parallel to Tony's, someone whose life was impossibly strange and probably best left unexamined.

"So ... you can hear it inside your body?" I went back to the topic of the pacemaker.

"Oh yeah, I had trouble sleeping after they put it in, but you sort of get used to it."

I suggested that he immediately start an autobiographical comic strip about his experiences, called The Ticking Man.

One night I had a vivid dream in which Tony devised a radical and experimental new comic strip called Mr. Upside-Down. He showed it to me in the dream. The layout was as you'd expect — regular panels and such — except for the fact that the nutty protagonist walked around the wrong way up, with his feet on the "ceiling" of the cartoon panels, while everyone else stood as they should, according to the unforgiving laws of gravity. Mr. Upside-Down's word ballons were also upside-down, so you had to rotate the page to read what he was saying. It was strange, funny, slightly disturbing, and absolutely captivating. I woke up desperately wanting to read more of the nonexistant strip. When I saw Tony next, in the real and waking world, I related the story to him and told him I thought he should actually create the strip.

"No, you should do it," he said. "It's much more your kind of thing. But if you do draw it, I should get royalties because it was my idea."

"But it was only your idea in my dream, so it's still mine," I argued.

"No," Tony replied, firmly. "Even though I was a figment of your imagination at that moment, the 'I' in your dream was still based on the real me in the real world, so it's still my idea becayse ut came from my extrapolated head, in your dream." He was joking, of course, but only partially, because he could always be counted on to debate using existential humor, and so I agreed that if I ever developed Mr. Upside-Down, I would pay him a reasonable royalty fee.

I suppose it's much too late for any of that now. Heart failure got Tony, years ago. He was scheduled for heart surgery — again — but was fed up with the pain he'd endured for so many years as a result of numerous earlier attempts. So, he declined the operation. Just said no. That was Tony, defiant right up to the end. They put him on a ton of pain killers and sedatives and he slipped away.

I wish he'd told me what he was doing. I would have talked him out of it. I would even have done the Mr. Upside-Down strip as a joint effort with him if he agreed to hang on for another year or ten. I was thinking about him today and how much I would like to get together one more time and absorb his comprehensive and slightly caustic take on complicated current London politics, and then maybe deconstruct The Prisoner again, for a few hours, or days. Maybe revisit the Tate Modern too, which was a favorite haunt of ours, or go to the cinema and gaze in appreciative silence at a bizarre indie film I'd never heard of (because Tony was one of those rare and valuable friends who knew never to talk or whisper at me in the movies). I would have liked that a whole lot because, as we get older, it seems damn difficult to find solid friends like him again. Solid, and comfortable to be with.

I was sad, but not really suprised, to discovery that Tony's cool website has vanished into the ether. What happens to our websites, that we put all that time into, when we're gone and there is no family or disciples to tend to them? I suppose one day the hosting money runs out, unnoticed by all save the hosting company, and our work just goes away into nothingness. At least I have scans of some of my favorite Tony Reeve comics saved, and also four adored pages of his originals in my art collection. It is a testament to Tony's sense of humor that the shark cartoon still makes me smile after all this time. I love it so much, and it's such a wry poke at modern art with, I suppose, an anthropological twist. But, I feel it contains at least one additional layer of meaning that I have yet to fully understand.

So, dear friend Tony, with that in mind and after many years of careful deliberation I have now decided it is the right and only thing to do, to finally and irrevocably assign to you, in perpetuity and throughout the universe, all rights to Mr. Upside-Down. Just in case you want to work on it — you know — one day. I'm sure it'll be brilliant.

The lush grass is almost ankle high, and a joyous and rich green; a memento of the long, cool, damp winter and fall. It feels redundant, but the adjective most suitable would be "leafy." Oversized dandelions speckle the gently sloping hills by the million: a constellation of gold stars against a sea of lazy chlorophyll. One field wanders to a near horizon; others are interrupted by stands of robust birches or horse chestnut trees — the latter's lampshade-like colonnades of flowers a promise of the reddish-brown nuts that will rain down from above in months to come. We called them conkers when I was a kid.

Across a quiet and narrow street lies a flower-spattered triangular park where young boys are playing soccer in brightly colored but mismatched shirts. No semblance of team training here, just kids having fun. A splendid tabby cat sits patiently on a stone doorstep, waiting to be let inside a house decorated by wiry vines. Two old men, one with rosy cheeks and a grey and battered flat cap on his head, talk softly over their Saturday afternoon beers. An extraordinarily beautiful tricolor collie dog dozes beside one of the men, her long and elegant chin resting on the instep of his boot while she dreams, perhaps, of chasing rabbits in the nearby forest.

A lawnmower pipes up briefly as a neighbor precisely and efficiently cuts the grass in his minuscule but perfect garden — hardly the size of two pool tables placed side by side. A hundred or more dainty purple pansies are happily packed into an old tin washing bucket at the lawn's edge. It is a superior example of recycling in action, and the pansies' mischievous little Rorschach faces stare out of their tub with whimsical and puzzling expressions. White cherry blossoms have started to burst from petite, well-pruned trees as have the crab apple flowers. Happy bees feast upon the sea of blossoms with such madness and enthusiasm that their buzzing sounds like aircraft engines.

The German people are magnificent recyclers. Here, an old washing bucket makes a happy home new for garden pansies.

I periodically hear a faint thud as, off in the distance, an experienced archer practices alone; feathered arrows thunking into the bullseye, one by one. Birds are chattering everywhere: sparrows and finches mostly, but occasionally a large woodpecker will peek cheekily out of the trees, or a raven will strut by -- cocky and full of disdain -- knowing that with his fine pickaxe beak and glistening black feathers, he is the haughtiest of birds.

Every one of my senses tells me that I am back in the idyllic English countryside of my childhood. But the sign on the pub says "Schutzenhouse" and the woodpecker is a species I've not seen in the UK. Even though the sights, and smells, and sounds all whisper to me that I have stepped back in time and am home, I am, in fact, in rural Germany.

Germany was forbidden to me as a child. My father was Jewish and a United States Army World War II veteran. He saw heavy action in the European Theater of Operations in France, Belgium, and — very briefly and until he was partially blown up by Nazi artillery — in Germany. Dad took the United States Army Air Force exam when he was eighteen years old, with the intention of becoming a B-17 bomber pilot. I only learned this fact comparatively recently and was more than a little surprised, as my father was a kind and gentle man, not given to violence or hatred. "I thought that, as a B-17 pilot," he said, "I could inflict the maximum amount damage on the Nazis." He made this astonishing out-of-character statement in an offhand manner, as if merely commenting upon the weather. My father's career as a bomber pilot did not materialize, due to the Air Force taking issue with his "poor" eyesight. I found that diagnosis extremely amusing as my father passed away in 2012, just shy of his 87th birthday, and never wore glasses a day in his life. I suppose I should be glad he failed that eye examination, otherwise I would almost certainly not have been around to write this piece -- American air crew losses over Germany during World War II being as catastrophic as they were.

My father's White Russian Jewish parents arrived in the States in the 1920s and they left plenty of family behind, both in Russia and in France. Even as a teenager, my father was aware — much sooner that most of the world, and with aching clarity — that something hideous was going on in Nazi-occupied Europe. "One day," he told me, "the letters just stopped." My father had family who died in the concentration camps, including an adored cousin who — to the best of my knowledge — survives only in one small and faded snapshot. My father made it through the Battle of the Bulge, mostly in one piece, but his best friend from high school did not. They joined up together, but young Andrew Yeaple never came home from the war. I gather that many or most of Dad's other comrades also did not return from Belgium, and the little I know about his wartime experiences were pieced together from occasional stories he would relate to me when the mood took him, which was roughly once per decade. I do know that he was twice decorated and that he was, unofficially, one of the very first Americans across the Siegfried Line into Germany, somewhere around the close of 1944, as a radioman in the 99th Combat Infantry Division, known as "The Checkerboard Division" after the image carried on its official insignia. That is when his reconnaissance vehicle was hit by 88-mm artillery shells. He crawled back to the demolished jeep, under heavy fire, and emptied his rifle into the company radio to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. Real John Wayne stuff, except I never think of Dad like that, because he was quiet and modest and it is difficult to imagine him as a warrior. He took a sizable piece of shrapnel through the left foot and his war was over. Dad's walking was a little impaired for the rest of his life but he never once complained. He recuperated on a floating hospital ship in UK waters, returned to the States in 1945, and once remarked to me that — as a result of being on serious painkillers for an extended period — he fully understood why some fell easily into morphine and heroin addiction.

My father did not care to talk about himself or his accomplishments. Much of his life, therefore, remains a mystery to me. He came from a poor family yet he graduated with a master's degree from New York's prestigious Columbia University, which he somehow managed to complete in only three years on the G.I. Bill (evidently there wasn't enough money to pay for a conventional four-year education). I once asked Dad how he managed such a feat and he replied: "We'd just come back from the war and nobody was going to tell us what we could or couldn't do." By "we," I assumed he meant all the others on the G.I. Bill who made it home, but I was never certain.

In his twenties, Dad went back to Europe and spent most of the next sixty years there. He once rode across Africa, entirely by himself, on a Triumph motorcycle and was later granted top secret clearance by the State Department. He worked in the code room of the American Embassy in Paris and that's where he met my mother. In fifty years, my father never satisfactorily explained to me what he was doing in Africa, or the code room, or why he would choose to cross that continent, alone, on a gorgeous and somewhat unreliable British motorcycle. The only anecdote he ever shared about the African adventure concerned an Arab who attempted to steal the Triumph from him. Dad produced an oversized Bowie knife (in my cinematic imagination it runs very much like the famous "That's a knife" scene in Crocodile Dundee) and the Arab, very sensibly, legged it.

During the 1950s, when my father was living in Paris, crossing Africa, and doing other mysterious things, some of which I am quite sure had some secret or strategic importance connected to them [see my third book, My Incredibly Strange and Amazing Real-Life Adventures in the World of Comic Books for more on this], the term posttraumatic stress disorder didn't exist. Combat veterans who had witnessed or experienced things too horrendous to assimilate were diagnosed as having "soldier's heart," "shell shock" or "operational fatigue." The symptoms and severity of PTSD were not properly understood, or even named until 1980, and among my father's generation it would have been regarded as "unmanly" or "weak" to admit to having such problems anyway. In her dissertation Combat Veterans Diagnosed with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: The Effect on Their Children: A Phenomenological Study, (University of Phoenix, 2007), Monika Frenz notes that "four out of five Vietnam combat veterans portray persistent PTSD symptoms (Price, 2006)." Since PTSD wasn't recognized as an affliction during the World War II era, many or most combat veterans from that time, on both sides, probably never received any sort of treatment or counseling and had to deal with it on their own ... as best they could.

My father doubtless carried the fallout of war — loss, horror, brutality, injury, and perhaps much more — deep inside. If it was a burden to him, he never showed it. His life during wartime did, however, manifest itself in one tangible way and that was the solid and unmovable edict that we, as a family, would never set foot in Germany. We traveled extensively when I was growing up, visiting virtually every country that shared a border with Germany, some of them repeatedly. Further, we were forbidden to have German products, of any kind, in the house. I recall my mother bringing home a bottle of grape juice when I was about nine years old. She found it in a health food store and I loved the taste of it. My mother did all the shopping and all the food preparation in our household but, for some reason, Dad happened to notice "Product of Germany" printed on the grape juice label and when he asked my mother why there was something German in the house, it was one of the few times in my life that I remember seeing him genuinely angry.

As any headstrong boy knows, when something is forbidden it develops a shiny and irresistible allure. Unavoidably, therefore, around the age of nine or ten I became utterly fascinated with World War II and German military technology in particular. Show me a picture of any 1940s-era Germany tank or airplane and I can tell you its entire history. Even more compelling was my fascination with the German rocket program. I searched used book shops for obscure and out-of-print titles, and became something of a young scholar on the subject. My ever-patient mother aided me, somewhat uncomfortably, in this quest for secret learning almost as if we, ourselves, were living under a totalitarian regime and clandestinely distributing banned literature. Looking back forty-odd years, it is easy to see myself as insensitive and disrespectful to my father's wishes. In my defense, however, I was a little boy and I did not yet know suffering, pain, and catastrophic loss. Now that I have experienced such things for myself, it is easier to find understanding. Reading German words may have been a trigger for Dad, or perhaps he just didn't want to support German commerce with his money.

In my adult life, I have been fortunate enough to make a number of highly valued German friends, primarily as a result of my science work -- and there is a wonderful life to science that transcends borders and politics -- but I had still never visited the country. A few years ago, I flew to Stuttgart to visit American friends in a sleepy little town named Bondorf, about forty-five minutes south of the city. My friends had learned to speak passable German and served admirably as translators (my German being slightly worse than my Russian, which is already quite dismal).

Germany, at last.

Spring came early to rural Germany that year. It was one of the lovliest seasons I can recall.

I walked here and there, to town, or to the country inn, along pretty, and quiet, and perfectly-maintained streets, and was almost instantly overwhelmed by the endless similarities between rural Germany and rural England. In fact, the Germans and the English are much more alike than they will ever admit, with their love of socializing at the pub; their adored cats and dogs; soccer in the park on weekends; beautiful little gardens, often adorned with a petite birdhouse; tidy and functional train stations; small and efficient cars (because gasoline is so expensive in Europe) kept immaculately clean; rural walks and bird sanctuaries; rolling farms, and barns and old churches, all lovingly tended. I don't know what I expected to find in Germany, but it certainly wasn't the sensation of journeying back to my childhood in England. One afternoon, I met up with an American Air Force friend outside the base there. He was dressed very smartly in a sporty white jacket of the sort that one might wear while sailing. I suppose I unconsciously assumed that he'd appear in uniform and was therefore interested to learn that U.S. military personnel are required to travel to and from our bases in civilian clothing. "We are still technically an occupying force," one soldier informed me in a tone that was kindly and respectful and carried with it a subtext that said: "But we don't want to be seen that way." He added: "Uniforms can make the Germans nervous."

I took the train into Stuttgart proper, and I could not help but stare discretely at the faces of a couple of old men riding along with us aboard the spotless public transportation that afternoon. A seventy three year-old retiree would have been five years old in 1945 when Germany was bombed into submission. How do you explain to a five year-old boy why his house has been obliterated?

I might be overly sensitive but I read pain and sadness in the older faces and I was conscious of a sadness in the landscape too. I imagined that the peaceful little town of Bondorf, where we were staying, had remained untouched by the ravages of conflict, but an elderly lady who lived through World War II corrected me, very gravely: "No part of Germany was untouched." I wondered what the wartime experiences of these old survivors had been like, but I couldn't ask. The Germans have excellent manners and it is regarded as odd, or even rude, to say hello to people you don't know. Asking deeply personal questions of strangers would appear ignorant and vulgar.

I am not an apologist; I am certainly not a revisionist and I am emphatically against visiting the sins of the father upon the children. The Nazis perpetrated terrible evil on the world, and ordinary German people paid for it. In a sense, they still are. "The war casts a long shadow," one long-time American resident told me. "And there's still a feeling of national guilt." Despite all of that, there is a gentle kindness in the people; they are neat, and courteous, and they care about the world. German citizens take their own glass and plastics to central recycling stations, and you cannot walk thirty feet without seeing a house covered by solar panels. It is a given that one does not litter, mow the lawn on Sundays (because others are resting), make noise after 10 p.m., honk your car horn unnecessarily, or make rude gestures at other drivers (you will be ticketed if you do, so visiting New Yorkers watch out!). Germany was the first country to begin separating trash for recycling and today remains a world leader in ecological awareness. The annual carbon dioxide emission of an average German citizen is less than half that of an average American, and Germany has pledged to cut their emissions by a further 40%. In the span of a single lifetime Germany has transformed, like a green phoenix, from the country trying to take over the world to the country trying to save it.

Stuttgart is a lovely city with parks and pedestrian precincts, young people out shopping, lively cafés, restaurants and shops, and I very quickly discovered that I preferred to dwell on modern Germany, rather than wartime history. I found it impossible to imagine the estimated 142,000 bombs that fell upon Stuttgart during 53 air raids. Instead, I bought a stylish jacket in an elegant clothing store and explored the Markthalle — a luminous concrete and glass Art Deco building constructed between 1911 and 1914, and today housing an exquisite international food market that would delight even the pickiest of gourmets.

The magnificent Art Deco Markthalle in Stuttgart

As I walked along sunny streets, I sifted through my own labyrinthine memories of my father in search of evidence that he suffered from PTSD. He was always a bit distant, but not emotionally cold, and he absolutely refused to be rushed or hurried, ever, by anyone, or for any reason. He loved to entertain and he enjoyed parties, long dinners, and mixing cocktails for his friends. He played chess frequently, read a respectable, intellectual newspaper (or two) every day of his life, and watched the news religiously. He never verbally criticized anyone that I can remember except, very occasionally and in a joking way, the Germans. He was not a hobbyist and did not collect any material items except for his modest library of classical music. He liked simple clothes and every car he ever bought had at least one previous owner. He was never mean or cruel to my mother, my younger brother, or to me. It is possible that Dad's strange solitary adventures a decade before I was born, and his methodical, slow-paced life were his own way of dealing with PTSD, if he even suffered from it which -- given what he went through -- seems extremely likely.

In later years, and to everyone's surprise, my father mellowed quite a bit. He became good friends with a German gentleman, Willy Feld, who had moved to London and was just about the same age as Dad. They played tennis every weekend when the weather was fair, and went to the pub together on Friday evenings. Willy was almost certainly in combat during World War II -- and on the opposing side -- but I would bet a thousand dollars in cash that neither of them ever mentioned it. I am sorry Dad didn't mellow just a bit more so he could have visited Germany one last time. I think he would have, like me, fallen in love with the land of his former enemy.

While we were talking to friends at the Meow Wolf "House of Eternal Return" opening in Santa Fe during the spring of 2016, Neil Gaiman pointed at me and said: "Geoff and I go back as far as it goes."

We met at an uptight, pompous, and hypocritical British "public" school in Greater London when we were ten years old. Neil doesn't remember the place with quite as much disdain as I do, but then he was busy losing himself in hefty science fiction tomes at the time. I wrote, somewhat briefly, about our school days in my first memoir, Rock Star: Adventures of a Meteorite Man, and again in my second memoir, My Incredibly Strange and Amazing Real-Life Adventures in the World of Comic Books and I dare say I will continue to rail against that sorry and savage institution in future works. I have, in fact, been repeatedly encouraged to write a whole book about our schooldays -- a la Raold Dahl's wonderful memoir, Boy.

There is a scene in Dream Dangerously, illustrated by one of my own comic strips, in which I imitate one of our nastier teachers who -- after catching Neil and me drawing comics at the back of class -- yells at us: "Gaiman and Notkin! Comics are rubbish. You two will never amount to anything!"

Forty-five years on, after starting a punk band together at age fifteen, both going into the comic business and, later, both going into film and television production, we are still pals. So much so that Neil advised the producers of his official documentary, Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously that they "couldn't finish the film without talking to Geoff." And what a treat it was to be talked to.

Dream Dangerously contains numerous scenes of book signings, interviews, and other similar interiors. So, after receiving a call from producer and cinematographer, Jordan Rennert, I suggested making a dramatic change by filming my segments in the deep desert. Jordan was full of enthusiasm. "It'll make a wonderful contrast to the scenes we filmed in Terry Pratchett's garden!" he exclaimed.

On New Year's Eve 2015/16, I took Jordan, his friend and colleague Henry Barajas, and a small production crew consisting of my cinematorgrapher Christian B. Meza and location photographer Jane MacArthur, out into the screaming wilderness. After that, Jane and I, and fellow television producer Eric Schumacher went to see the new Star Wars movie. It was a spectacular way in which to spend the final day of 2015.

"Seeing the film is, for me, like
looking at a map of Neil's life and,
by extension, our lives"

We did more filming a couple of days later and I felt an immediate kinship with this crew that had spent years making a documentary about my oldest friend. I became more involved with Dream Dangerously, eventually receiving an executive producer credit. What is it like watching, commenting upon, and being part of a documentary film about someone you have known for nearly your entire life? It is intriguing and slightly schizophrenic:

Here is the person I grew up with in familiar situations.

Here is the person I grew up with in completely unfamiliar situations.

Then I think about how much trouble we used to get into at school and how Neil eventually became one of the most celebrated writers of our generation ... in spite of school. Seeing the film is, for me, like looking at a map of Neil's life and, by extension, our lives. The map is drawn by someone else, but someone who knows the land really well.

Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously European premiere poster

On Saturday, I shall be at the charming and elegant Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe, for the Southwestern theatrical premiere of Dream Dangerously. The theater is owned by famed fantasy and science fiction writer George R.R. Martin, who is also a long-time friend of Neil's. George and I go pretty far back too, though not in the same way; I'm not a Johnny-come-lately Game of Thrones fan. I discovered Sandkings and Fevre Dream in the early 1980s and have been a "GRRM" enthusiast ever since. Following the screening, George, Patrick, Jordan, and I will participate in a live Q&A and it will be interesting to share anecdotes about Neil, as we all know him best through different parts of the same life.

Dream Dangerously officially releases today, Friday, July 8 on Vimeo and you can watch the trailer or purchase the film here. In a rather brilliant promotional idea, the producers organized free screenings of the film at comic shops and bookshops around the country on Saturday, July 9. I love this! Neil and I were teenage punk rockers and there is something very punk rock do-it-yourself about organizing a one-day "tour" of free showings at indie comic shops. After all, our roots are in comic books. Next month, I take the film to Scotland, where we will present the European premiere of Dream Dangerously at The New Town Theatre on August 12, procued by The New Wee Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Interestingly enough, New Town is just down the street from one of the locations in the film.

I said to Patrick: "The highest compliment I can give is to say that your film shows the Neil that I know." Brilliant Neil, funny Neil, sometimes quiet and mild-mannered Neil who scrupulously makes time for his fans. All of them. To the extent that -- in the film -- you see him immersing his hands in a giant bucket of ice to try and relieve the pain and cramps from signing all those books. Neil's life reads a bit like one of his own fairytales for grownups. And I was never more proud of anyone.

Last week I was in Boston. In a bookshop on Newbury Street I saw a hardback edition of Neil's latest book -- his nonfiction collection -- The View from the Cheap Seats, which includes the moving Introduction he wrote for my own Rock Star memoir. An impressive stack of copies sat grandly on the New Releases table. Cheap Seats had been placed next to a recent Kurt Vonnegut edition. I took a photo of the adjacent covers and posted it on Twitter. The caption read: "Gaiman and Notkin! You two will never amount to anything ... apart from being next to Vonnegut."

The idea was born during a splendid outdoor lunch in the sunny, dog-friendly garden of Doris Day's charming restaurant in Carmel, California, early this year, when my life was very different. "Weird Earth Orbit Tour" is a pun on "Near Earth Orbit," a term used to describe asteroids that pass close by our home planet. Back then, there were only six scheduled speaking dates. Over the months, invitations came in and my fun little speaking tour evolved into a six-country marathon which included television, radio, podcasts, museum and theater appearances, two comic book conventions, one science fiction convention, and even a stint with a local comedy improv group who acted out live skits based on stories about my life.

During my travels I completed work on my third book, My Incredibly Strange and Amazing Real-Life Adventures in the World of Comic Books, which was published this Halloween. I am on the move so very much that I have come to view the airplane and the hotel as adaptable, portable offices. Rather than space out in front of televison and film recordings I decided to use my mobile hours typing in my ever-changing workshop, and the new book's forward states:

"The bulk of this book was written on airplanes, and in hotel rooms and departure lounges, and other places where peripatetic people gather and wait, during the spring of 2015. Two chapters and all of the design were born in my offices in downtown Tucson. Some of my favorite passages were written in my quiet satellite office in the Sonoran Desert, late at night, when inspiration or understanding arrived demanding to be heard, much like the far-off freight trains that cry in the darkness as they pass through the Tucson basin en route to California or Texas."

Today, I head out on the final leg of the Weird Earth Orbit Tour which takes me first to Switzerland for a TEDx talk entitled, "Meteorites: Life, Death, and Hope on Earth," then on to Germany, and finally to the adored land of my youth -- dear old England. One of the highlights for me will be a presentation at the Sir Patrick Moore Planetarium at the National Space Center in Leicester. The planetarium is named after a famed British astronomer and one of my personal childhood heroes, without whose quirky and engaging personality I might never have become a television host and science communicator.

I love public speaking. I have been a performing artist for most of my life and presenting talks gives me the opportunity to practice two things I care deeply about: good showmanship and good science communication. I feel a kinship for young students who wish to be scientists or artists but who do not get the motivation or encouragement they crave at school ... because that was me as a kid. I want to share my life story because many of my dreams did come true and those kids need to know that their dreams can come true too, if they are willing to work for them.

When things are going well, I find it both easy and invigorating to get up on stage and give an animated talk to an appreciative audience. A good presentation produces a benign feedback loop: attendees are amused and hopefully educated, and I am energized by their enthusiasm. The real challenge comes when things are not going so well. Everyone experiences hardship and system malufuctions in their day-to-day lives and that is where my rock 'n' roll and performance background comes in so very handy. Even when equipment doesn't work, or you don't feel well, the show must go on. And you have to mean it when you get up on stage. Going through the motions doesn't work.

It is also important to reflect upon the fact that even though I am usually the only one on stage, I am just part of a hardworking team that makes such a lengthy international hejira possible. The Aerolite Meteorites and Desert Owl Productions staff are minor celebs in their own right and are affectionately known as The Space Rockettes.

I have something that the Weird Earth Orbit Tour's namesake and my fellow long-distance traveller -- the lonely near earth asteroid -- doesn't have: friends to come home to, and friends to help me along the way.

]]>biz@aerolite.org (Geoff Notkin)Searching The SkiesMon, 09 Nov 2015 23:33:08 +0000My Life In Comics And Why Special Editions Are Specialhttp://geoffnotkin.com/home/geoffs-blog/my-life-in-comics-and-why-special-editions-are-special
http://geoffnotkin.com/home/geoffs-blog/my-life-in-comics-and-why-special-editions-are-special

Few of us have the opportunity to follow through on those whimsical childhood dreams such as: "I want to be an astronaut, fireman, lion tamer, or cartoonist." I am one of the lucky ones. I followed through on more than one and, although traveling into space has, thus far, eluded me I have not yet given up. More on that in the future.

Like many boys, I hoped and imagined I might become an astronaut, but I also dreamed of finding rocks from space and drawing cartoons. While I habitually blame both my parents for my obsession with meteorites (Dad was an amateur astronomer; Mother fueled my passion for visits to the Natural History Museum, London), my late mother must fully accept the blame for my life-long love affair with comics. Well, her and my old friend Neil Gaiman.

Mom first gave me comic books in order to distract me, and this first occurred immediately after my younger brother, Andrew was born. It is my understanding that Mother felt comics would keep my science and science fiction-hungry child brain occupied so she could fuss over the newborn infant.

"If [Mother] had known the far-reaching repercussions of that gift, I believe she may have presented me with an Enid Blyton or Dr. Seuss volume instead (she did try, later, to wean me off comics and onto Zane Grey and Edgar Allan Poe, with only marginal success) . . . She was not exactly against comics, but I believe she saw them as fodder for the feeble-minded and expected me to spend my time reading material of a more intellectual flavor."

At the age of ten I was sent to a humorless and overly strict, all-boys British public school where I almost immediately met Neil Gaiman. He was the first person I knew who was as fixated upon four-color comics as I. Our shared love of the medium fostered a decades-long friendship that continues to this day. Neil was my very first stop on a kaleidoscopic journey through comicdom that would be filled with mad coincidence, adventure, and good fortune. Over the coming years I encountered, befriended, and worked with Spirit creator Will Eisner, Mad magazine co-founder Harvey Kurtzman, Pulitzer prize-winning creator of Maus, Art Spiegelman, and so many other comics luminaries they could fill a book. Which they did.

My Incredibly Strange and Amazing Real-Life Adventures in the World of Comic Books was born out of a wistful desire to revisit and remember my earlier career as a cartoonist and associate editor of Raw Books & Graphics -- a leading avant garde comic publisher in New York City during the 1980s. The book was written on airplanes, and in hotel rooms and departure lounges, and other places where peripatetic people gather and wait, during the spring of 2015, as I hurried around the world -- myself appearing, I imagine, much like a winged (or at least, flighty) cartoon character -- in pursuit of my current career as science writer, television host, producer, and public speaker.

In the spirit of underground comics, and Raw magazine, and micropress runs of the funny little indie comics I loved, I wanted my comics memoir -- my third book and perhaps my most personal work -- to come to life with the care and minute idiosyncrasies that only a handcrafted edition can know. To that end, the initial print run is limited to just 250 copies, each of which is signed and numbered and carries an exclusive tipped-in color panel on the inside front cover. There will be another edition later, I suppose, that will be born on big automated presses and carry an ISBN number but, like a site-specific art installation, or a guerilla play that is only performed once, this special edition has a personal and handcrafted touch that feels to me more like artifact that publication.

"The more we as a society move towards a digital and instantly reproducible, short-attention-span world, the more those of us who care about such matters will yearn for, and appreciate, the dwindling craft of making actual things."

The book will be published on Halloween 2015 and the launch event will be at the Tucson Science Fiction Convention (TusCon), where I will surely be surrounded by like-minded people who, with their lovingly-made cosplay costumes and adored comic book collections, fully understand and appreciate what it means to make something carefully, slowly, and entirely out of love.

"There are other creative types — film directors and singer/songwriters for example — who must master multiple talents, but cartooning is a solitary profession and there is no artist who walks quite so alone, and with quite so many tools in his bag as the cartoonist"

When I was a little lad growing up in London, my first great love was geology. After graduating from high school I went to work for an American oil exploration company based in southern England. I quickly learned that research work in the lab was not the path I was destined to take. I wanted to be out there in the savage places — deserts, rift valleys, and volcanoes — cracking up slabs with my rock hammer, rather than studying seismic charts in an office.

At an early age I devised a list of what a nine year-old considered to be the geological wonders of the world. I intended on seeing every one of them and I have done well: Vesuvius, Oregon's Crater Lake, The Grand Canyon, Chile's Atacama Desert, the fjords and glaciers of Norway, Meteor Crater in Arizona, and the steaming geysers of Iceland. But one important place on that list eluded me: the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.

My father spent the last ten years of his life Dublin and a few years ago I made the lengthy trip from Tucson to see him. Following a little gentle coercion, Dad agreed to rent a car, just the two of us — no wives, friends, or friends of friends — and set off to the wild coasts of Northern Ireland.

We stayed in a grand, ivy-covered hotel in the small town Bushmills which is home to the whisky distillery of the same name and only a few miles from the Giant's Causeway. We arrived late in the day and Dad announced that he would enjoy a nap. I knew the shuttle bus that took visitors to the Causeway would have ceased operations, but Dad encouraged me to see if I could find my own way down the site.

The visitors' car park was empty, the gift shop closed, but Ireland's northerly latitude delivers long summer evenings, so I set out on foot. It was good haul and somewhat damp and chilly for a resident of the Sonoran Desert. I saw a couple of windblown sightseers staggering forlornly back to their cars. Eventually, I came up over a rise and there was the Causeway ahead of me — spectacularly deserted.

The Causeway, contradictory to colorful local lore, was not fabricated by giants or legendary warriors during some distant mythical period. It is the result of ancient volcanic activity which created a stone forest of hexagonal, basalt columns. These geometric pedestals, estimated to be some 40,000 in number and of varying heights and sizes, arc into a restless grey and green sea like a monstrous pipe organ. They are at least 50 million years old and formed when molten lava cooled upon contact with the tempestuous and chilly North Atlantic Ocean.

I clambered over every inch of that geological wonderland, shielding my cameras from spray as waves broke around me. When the sun set, I tore myself away and returned to the hotel. Bubbling over with amazement I described the Causeway to my amused father. Open-minded though Dad was, the geological marvel was still just a pile of black rocks to him.

Being resourceful chaps, we agreed to disagree on that matter and went to the Bushmill's distillery. I sipped a glass of whisky and solemnly added a long sought-after check mark to my childhood list. I did not know it at the time, but that would be the last of many travels I made with my father. He passed away in 2012.

Tucked away in an elegant strip mall in the chic California town of Novato, just off Route 101 and a short hop north from San Francisco, is a scientific and educational treat that is as fascinating for adults as it is for children. Managing somehow to be at once welcoming, friendly, and imposing, The Space Station Museum is the brainchild of forward-thinking businessman Ken Winans, who conceived it as a way to share his remarkable space memorabilia collection. Sponsored by several local businesses, The Space Station is as unusual as it is delightful.

The museum houses an impressive collection of authentic "flown" artifacts (a term that collectors use to describe spaceflight hardware that has actually been used during off-Earth missions) from American and Russian space programs, including historic spacesuits and spacecraft control panels. Much larger crowd-pleasers are also on display, such as full-size mockups of the lunar model and the lunar rover. Visitors have the opportunity to see genuine meteorites, space-related artwork, and browse through a selection of nerd-friendly toys and souvenirs in the gift shop.

The Space Station employs a refreshingly different approach to larger, conventional and, one might say, clunkier museums. Rather than housing his collection in a monolithic downtown building, or a hard-to-get to edifice in the middle of a park, Ken Winans chose to display it in an easily accessible shopping area complete with free parking and eclectic dining. There is no crowded and overpriced museum cafeteria at this venue. And the best part? Admission to The Space Station Museum is free. Open on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays and by appointment on Thursdays, the exhibits are staffed by a knowledgeable cadre of enthusiastic volunteers, ranging from high school students (some of whom receive extra credit in exchange for their time) to aerospace professionals. And the museum’s neighbors are all ardent fans of the enterprise. How could they not be? Visiting teachers and school groups dine and shop with surrounding businesses and the typical competition between rival storefronts has here been replaced by a neighborhood camaraderie that I have seldom seen elsewhere.

[pictured] Treated to a private tour of The Space Station Museum by founder Ken Winans

During a recent private visit I witnessed am amusing incident which, I imagine, is repeated in some form almost daily. Ken and I were seated next door to the museum, outside, enjoying a snack, when a mother and daughter pulled up in an old Buick and parked directly in front of The Space Station. It being a Wednesday the place was closed, but through wide windows, one could not help but gape at the full-size lunar module replica squatting inside, imperiously, like a magnificent Titan-sized mechanical toad.

“What’s that?” the daughter exclaimed, pointing.

“I think it’s part of the outer space museum,” her mother replied, also clearly intrigued.

“Awesome.” The kid peered longingly at the black and white, black, and gold vehicle and, as I watched her, I remembered that Grumman Aerospace named the very first module “Spider.” Its insect-like appearance is undeniable.

And so the marvel of Apollo-era spaceflight continues to inspire the next generation, one kid at a time.

Ken is a well-known and well-liked supporter of, and advocate for, manned spaceflight and he is a regular attendee at Tucson’s SpaceFest. Held every other year at the Starr Pass Resort, it is one of the world’s premiere spaceflight events, and the venue at which Ken and I first met (SpaceFest 2016 will be held in from June 9 through 12 in Tucson). Ken’s personal friendships with a number of NASA astronauts means The Space Station regularly enjoys visits from some of the most colorful and charismatic voyagers ever to leave our little blue-green planet. This Saturday, August 1, is the bright highlight of The Space Station’s calendar and the event that presents the largest number of celebrity guests — the annual Novato Space Festival. It is a sort of block party for space and science geeks and much more fun than a space nerd like me should reasonably expect from a trip to a strip mall. I am flying up from Tucson to spend the day there as a guest of the museum to talk about what I know best — meteorites. As a member of the Board of Governors of the National Space Society, one of my happy duties is promoting and furthering interest in manned spaceflight. So, just for one day, The Space Station’s space rock collection will be temporarily augmented by some remarkable pieces that I have brought with me from the Aerolite Meteorites collection.

Excited as I am to be part of this day that celebrates spaceflight, past and present, I am very much a supporting character. The real stars are four NASA astronauts who will be sharing tales of their incomparable adventures in outer space. While I travel the surface of this large asteroid we call Earth in search of extraterrestrial visitors from the cosmos, these NASA adventurers — the most daring of all explorers — have actually been out there where the meteorites that I study, and perhaps itself, originated.

The Novato Space Festival is suitable for all ages. The hours are 10 am to 4 pm, Saturday, August 1, 2015.

My work on the television show Meteorite Men has raised international public awareness of, and interest in, meteorites to an extraordinary degree. The show has aired on all seven continents and has been seen by millions of people. This has made meteorite collecting and meteorite hunting popular hobbies and untold new meteorites have been found as a result. These finds add to the scientific body of knowledge and benefit museums, university researchers, and collectors, but it is important to remember where meteorites come from.

The vast majority originate from within the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Since the recovery of meteorites is both my passion and my career, I am excited when a new meteorite hits the Earth. Provided it isn't too large. Some of my colleagues have joked with me that working with the Sentinel Mission and Asteroid Day to raise global awareness about the very real danger of asteroid impacts is against my better interests, because I want asteroidal fragments to collide with Earth, so I can collect more meteorites. That really isn't funny.

In 1999, I was lucky enough to visit the Popigai Crater at the northern edge of Siberia, and I recounted this magnificent expedition at some length in my memoir, Rock Star: Adventures of a Meteorite Man. The crater is spectacular in its size: roughly 100 kilometers in diameter and that means you could fit the country of Luxembourg into it four times. The impact that formed the Popigai Crater took place about 35 million years ago and would have caused devastation on a scale that has never been witnessed by humans. There are many such ancient craters on our planet, a few of them even vaster in size than Popigai. These massive craters were created when medium to large asteroid fragments slammed into our planet with catastrophic force.

[above] Being airlifted into the Popigai meteorite crater in northern Siberia

Statistics tell us, with certainty, that it is only a matter of time before another such impact occurs. It could be millions of years from now, or just a few years. This Tuesday, June 30, I am joining a host of celebrated and accomplished astronauts, scientists and artists to ask for "A rapid hundred-fold acceleration of the discovery and tracking of Near-Earth Asteroids to 100,000 per year within the next ten years." We have the technology and we have the resources. We are just not doing what we need to do to preserve our planet and our species. And, by the way, much as I love the film Armageddon, Bruce Willis' planet-saving tactics are not among those being seriously considered.

Asteroid Day is a worldwide event. I will be speaking at the California Academy of Sciences, along with Peter Jenniskens and Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, B612 Foundation/Sentinel Mission founders and former astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Ed Lu and many others. The other premier event is taking place at London's Science Museum. The proceedings will be broadcast live at AsteroidDay.org and while you are visiting that website, please take a look at the genuinely astonishing list of luminaries who have signed the 100X Asteroid Day Declaration (I am honored to be among them), and please add your name. Contrary to what the Vogons thought, our planet is worth saving.

Here is an amusing little "impact" video I made that might help get the point across. If a 70-lb meteorite can do this much damage, imagine what a fragment weighing a few hundred thousand tons could manage.

]]>biz@aerolite.org (Geoff Notkin)Searching The SkiesSun, 28 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000The World Famous Frank Show And Why I Love Radiohttp://geoffnotkin.com/home/geoffs-blog/world-famous-frank-show-and-why-i-love-radio
http://geoffnotkin.com/home/geoffs-blog/world-famous-frank-show-and-why-i-love-radio

Radio and television personality Steve Allen is credited with saying: "Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless," and with the seemingly never-ending parade of content-less "reality" shows currently nullifying the minds of viewers worldwide, it is easy to agree with him.

I fell in love with radio at age sixteen when BBC Radio 4 first broadcast Douglas Adams' magnificenht Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It aired in the evenings and I was home, recovering from a severe cold when I stumbled upon those first life-changing episodes. I listened intently, wearing big, boxy 1970s headphones so as not to disturb my parents, while fugitive Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebox's two heads argued amongst themselves, and a depressed robot antagonized talking doors on a spaceship that could instantaneously travel anywhere in the universe, with improbably consequences.

Untold millions of fans are, today, familiar with Adams' work, as it has been repackaged as a television show, numerous books, a big-budget feature film, various stage productions, and even a towel (I wish I'd bought one of them back in the day). True Hitchhiker's fans know that the first, and best, iteration was as a radio show, recorded on multi-track reel-to-reel tape machines and produced, brilliantly, by Geoffrey Perkins, with little time and less money. Paddy Kingsland and the wonderfully-named BBC Radiophonic Workshop created atmospheric music and sound effects using, mostly, early analog synthesizers. Kingsland's quirky and catchy melodies are the perfect backdrop for the bizarrely original alien worlds that Adams dreamed up in his beautiful madness, including one where robots fabricate "continent toupees" for planets that have used up all of their forests. The number 42, featured in the series, is widely recognized as the inexplicable "answer to life, the universe, and everything" provided after millions of years of silent contemplation by a cantankerous computer named Deep Thought. That number, and Hitchhiker's itself,is paid righteous homage in everything from the numerals on Fox Mulder's apartment in The X-Files to the name of the band Level 42.

[above] Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans will appreciate my little Ford Prefect homage.
The rest of you really need to figure out where your towels are.

For many years, Adams resisted licensing a film version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because he feared Hollywood would turn his brilliantly cerebral and nutty creation into "Star Wars with jokes," as he put it. Even with a Star Wars-sized budget, I am quite certain a film version could never match the startling visuals formed inside my head via glorious 1970s BBC stereo and with the kind cooperation of clunky old headphones. If any single supports the validity of radio's "theater of the mind" moniker, it is the original Hitchhiker's. The entire radio show has been released on audio CDs by the BBC and I highly recommend it for fans of funny, puzzling, intellectual science fiction (think Monty Python's Flying Circus meets Babylon 5 with a dash of IT Crowd).

Although I am best known as the television host of Meteorite Men and STEM Journals, I am an avid fan of good radio. I worked as day manager at a college radio station in New York City, WSVA Rock 59, for several years during the 1980s, and also hosted a punk rock show called Into The Future. I was overjoyed, and slightly envious, just last year when long-time friend, former rock 'n' roll band mate, founder of the antifolk movement, and fellow Hitchhiker's devotee, Lach, scored his very own series -- two seasons and counting! -- on the venerable BBC Radio 4, named The Lach Chronicles. As such, and time permitting, I typically accept radio opportunities when they present themselves. I am a regular on Slice of Sci-Fi, the world's foremost science fiction radio show, and my buddy Lach happened to be in New York City when I was guesting on The Jim Bohannon Show. Jim, a gracious host, kindly allowed me to bring Lach to the studio with me. When Jim asked Lach, on the air, about the teenage Geoff Notkin, he told a preposterous story, completely made up and off the cuff, about how he and our fellow band mates knew I would become a meteorite specialist because I used to stand outside and gaze up at the skies every night, on my own and for hours on end.

[above] The author, left, and Professor Dante Lauretta
supposedly filming an episode of STEM Journals,
while playing with grown-up space toys at the OSIRIS-REx headquarters in Tucson

My friend Dante Lauretta, lead investigator of the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, is a regular on The World Famous Frank Show on KLPX, here in Tucson. When he asked me if I might like to join him to talk about Phoenix Comicon and our other upcoming projects, I leapt at the chance. To prepare for our Thursday, May 14 9 am Pacific interview slot, Frank's team posted a video on The Frank Show Facebook page, inviting listeners to post questions for Dante and me to answer during the program.

Here is the first one that appeared: "Is time as we know it on earth relevant to time spent in space away from Earth? And is there a time distortion the further you get away from Earth?"

It is an excellent question and I dare say we will be tacking it (and many other mind-benders, including, possibly the truth about Zaphod Beeblebrox) tomorrow morning. Prior to that, please imagine my delight, when The Frank Show promptly posted an answer to the listener's question

And that answer was: "42"

Listen live at www.klpx.com
9 am Pacific, Thursday, May 14. It is going to be tons of spacey fun.

]]>biz@aerolite.org (Geoff Notkin)Searching The SkiesWed, 13 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000Meet The New Blog, And Remembering "Voice Of Tucson"http://geoffnotkin.com/home/geoffs-blog/meet-the-new-blog-and-remembering-voice-of-tucson
http://geoffnotkin.com/home/geoffs-blog/meet-the-new-blog-and-remembering-voice-of-tucson

These past five years would have been very different, were it not for a mask.

My first winter in Tucson began on January 8, 2004. I forever left behind the mean, sooty snow of New York City and moved into a teeny and adorable adobe house with a picture-postcard red tile roof, on Stewart Avenue, just a short amble from Casa Video. Nearly all of my belongings were stashed in a grey-floored storage facility west of the Hudson River; only a catapult’s throw from once intimately-known haunts in New York’s East Village, Hoboken, the Upper West Side. Friends said I was mad to leave New York. One predicted loudly: “You’ll be back from your silly desert adventure in six months, with your tail between your legs.”

In the years that followed, I barely went back to visit.

I drove cross-country with my cat, Bonnie, a Yamaha guitar that former bandmate Anne Husick gave me one birthday, a computer, and a few favorite books, rocks, and photographs. My new spartan home was zen-like in its ethereal emptiness. As a rabid lifelong collector of things, I had never experienced such delightful voluntary deprivation of the stimuli of stuff. That first winter lives in my memory like an accidental afternoon demi-nap; perched at the edge of sleep, floating between pillow and consciousness, a rarely-felt contentedness minutely needled by the gnawing guilt of knowing I should be doing something more productive than contemplating evening fires, in solitude, beside a terra cotta chiminea.

I met people and found places. Few experiences are more rejuvenating than starting over in a new town with little or nothing in tow, discovering strange sites that will one day evolve, unnoticed, into regular hangouts — restaurants, clubs, and book shops that, once new, now carry a requisite “I always go there” subhead whenever they are mentioned.

A friend informed me that I must witness the All Souls Procession on the weekend after Halloween. As a drummer and percussionist, a long-time Burning Man veteran, and something of a pyromaniac, I was entranced by the demented cacophony of the parade — all batty joy and costumed anarchy. I observed the spectacle from the corner of Fourth Avenue and Toole street, where marchers rising up from the underpass appeared as paint-spattered ghosts and monsters emerging from the underworld. I quickly became distraught.

“Dammit!” I exclaimed. “I should be in this parade, not watching it.”

I am an artist and I like to build things. I likely have the mad inventor gene in me as well. I am definitely an over-achiever and I cannot abide undertaking tasks in a half-hearted manner. After the 2004 procession, I therefore began the design and construction of an elaborate mask which I would wear in the following year’s All Souls Procession. My vision was inspired somewhat by Native American art, a bit by Gene Simmons, but mostly by John Cleese’s “There are some who call me ... Tim” character from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (at the time, I knew nothing of mask making, save what I could recall from messy papier maché fiascos in kindergarten). The resultant piece, fabricated of gauze and plaster of paris layered over a wire frame, weighed so much that I needed the innards from a construction helmet to support it on my head. After sanding, painting, and the addition of some small LEDs, the mask became part of my first All Souls costume.

Some months elapsed. My belongings arrived from the East Coast and I acquired a larger and more modern home into which I could insert all of my things. I now had a proper office and a more substantial garden in which to explode chimineas, a wider driveway, and some grand saguaros with noisy Gila woodpeckers en suite. I was quite happy, but in the abandonment of simplicity, something desirable and impalpable had been lost.

Living alone in the new residence allowed me plenty of space to develop more masks. I became an enthusiastic — nay, manic — participant in the All Souls Processions that followed, building new costumes each year, carrying a savagely-painted tom tom, marching with drummers, depositing mementoes of deceased loved ones into a burning cauldron, and whooping loudly as we flooded through the Fourth Avenue underpass (the best part of the whole event — all that glorious reverb). Once, I paused to bow my masked visage before an adroit figure magnificently adorned as the Egyptian god Anubis (full jackal head and all). He brushed two fingers lightly across my right shoulder, as if in consecration. It felt magical.

Midway through the 2008 procession I was accosted by a vivacious reporter with vibrant crimson hair. Would I answer a few questions, she wondered, particularly about my black and white mask. She asked if I was marching for anyone in particular (participants often make the communally spiritual and physical journey in memory of one who has passed on during the previous year). When the brief interview was completed she paused and said: “Unless there’s anything you’d like to add?”

“Yes, in fact, there is,” I blurted, quickly and eagerly. I awkwardly removed the giant mask and cradled it in both hands so the interviewer might be certain there was some kind of a human under all that camouflage, and proceeded to speak passionately (or perhaps in the manner of a deranged person) and at some length about what a vital and unique event All Souls is — “A reinterpretation of Mexican culture and customs by our blessedly off-beat Tucson artists . . . One of the most important arts events in the country,” and so forth. A few days later the journalist, Ryn Gargulinski, published an expansive article on the All Souls experience in Tucson Citizen which was, at the time, Arizona’s oldest newspaper. I was quoted extensively and felt only slight embarrassment at my exuberance.

In the spring of 2009 an email arrived from Ryn. Did I remember her, she asked (Of course!). The print edition of the dear old Citizen had died, she explained, but the spirit of the paper would live on in the form of a new online blogger collective to be named The Voice of Tucson. (Did anyone march in that year’s All Souls Procession in honor of the Citizen’s tragic demise?)

“I've been reading some of your work. Would you be interested in becoming one of our founding writers?” she inquired. I was thrilled, honored, overwhelmed. My elderly father was visiting from Europe at the time and, as was typical of him, he cautioned me — in an irritating manner that combined concern with vague disapproval — not to take on any other responsibilities. I didn’t listen, of course, and I am glad of that.

If I recall correctly, I was one of the six original founding writers for The Voice of Tucson. I got to know Ryn better as she was the industrious author of two separate daily blogs. Mark Evans — focused and articulate, patient but concise, and powerfully supportive of his writers — became our managing editor and our champion.

I ran an online contest asking for help naming the soon-to-be-launched blog (or “column” as I preferred to call it). My old school friend, Jon Mided, an ingenious UK-based photographer, came up with the winning entry: The Logical Lizard.

I believe we had — at our peak — between seventy and eighty bloggers, some of whom were very prolific, covering topics as diverse as local politics, geology, insects, movies, sports, restaurant reviews, travel, contemporary dance, and pets. Something for everyone. I became friendly with fellow writers Carolyn Classen and Pablo Bley (author of our science fiction column). The site was imposing, with a front page feed that constantly updated as new columns were posted. Every day or two, a few articles would be featured in a rotating banner at the top of the home page, complete with photo and pull quote. I loved it when one of my pieces ended up in that coveted spot and, on quite a few occasions, I posted a screen shot of same on one of my social media platforms.

I commissioned local artist Timothy Arbon to create an original logo for me — a Gila monster porting a geologist’s hammer.

I didn’t write every day — actually, not even close — but I did spend four and half years producing exclusive content for the Citizen online. Some of my essays were elaborate. Among them was a series called “Geological Wonders of the World,” a production diary about my then-current television series Meteorite Men on Discovery networks, and commentaries on science, history, cinema, and local artists. I consider a few of those columns to be among my strongest writing ever. I attended the Tucson Festival of Books as a guest of The Voice of Tucson booth and Mark said, teasingly: “You’re one of our best writers but now that you’re a television star, you only post once a year!” (He was exaggerating, but it's true that I was overly busy with television and do I bitterly regret missing Voice of Tucson social events).

In time, Ryn moved on. Shortly before The Voice of Tucson died, Mark also accepted a position elsewhere and was replaced by former sports editor Anthony Gimino. I don’t know if Mark intuitively felt that the project was doomed and decided — sensibly enough — to move on before it crashed, or if his progeny just couldn’t bear to live on without him. I could be miles off target here, but I estimate that some 24,570 pieces were published by The Voice of Tucson during its five-year lifespan (Carolyn alone wrote 1,550 posts). Add to that the time spent by Mark and his tech staff and I believe it reasonable to posit that somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 work hours were expended on its creation and upkeep.

On January 31, 2014, Tucson Citizen’s The Voice of Tucson was terminated, without warning, by corporate owner Gannett (ironically it is still listed on their website as one of their "brands"). If you visit the Tucson Citizen site today, you will be greeted by a plain and demoralized white page displaying an uncomfortably wide search bar that seems to say: “I was thrown together in a hurry and nobody cares.” I would prefer it said: “Here, once, was a wonderful thing.” A terse message states that “This archive [is provided] as a community resource for Tucsonans who want to research the history and traditions of their city.” The message makes it sound as if Gannetf has done a great service to readers. It is true that print articles from 1993 to 2006 are archived there (and presented in such a poor manner, with missing images and no formatting, that I doubt anyone reads them), but the vast majority of the original content produced for The Voice of Tucson is gone forever. Carolyn commented upon its demise in a piece for Blog for Arizona. She mentioned that bloggers were allegedly given a one-month window in which to download their work from the site's servers, but if such a notice was indeed sent, I never received it.

These days, it costs next to nothing to host a web archive; some companies offer such things for free in exchange for a smidgen of advertising. I am a business owner and I understand that sometimes ventures must end because they are unprofitable or unworkable. But there is also a kind way and a considerate way in which to do things. We might hope that a caring publisher would have saved the The Voice of Tucson's voices — all those thousands of unique insights into our quirky city and its people — for future readers. We might hope that a caring publisher would exhibit a sliver of courtesy and give notice to its unpaid volunteer writers that their work was about to be trashed — you know, just in case somebody might want to back up their years of work (I saved copies of mine, just in case, but I promise you not all the bloggers did).

Writing for The Voice of Tucson was one of the most fulfilling episodes of my career. Mark gave his team plenty of space to explore topics that interested them and also provided solid and thoughtful advice when asked. I was disheartened and angered by the site’s cruel end. For a long time I didn’t want to write at all, but then I asked myself why I would let a corporate publisher spoil my day? They’re not worth it.

I conceived a plan to start a new blog using the old name — Logical Lizard — at least partly out of spite (I own it and all the content, not Gannett). When, however, the talented artist who developed this new website sent his concept to me he had, on a whim, employed the words “Searching the Skies” as a placeholder. Since searching the skies is what I do — both literally and metaphorically — I was very taken with the phrase. And, as Paul Weller remarked when asked why he refused to reunite his hugely successful punk-era band, The Jam: “I’m a modernist. I believe in moving forward.”

“There’s definitely already an astronomy, radar, satellite, or space exploration blog, company, foundation, or something like it, with that name,” I lectured to my staff with both certainty and disdain. But, to my surprise, there wasn’t. And now there is.

Welcome to Searching the Skies. From time to time, I will repost some of the best of the Logical Lizard here. I don’t want those essays to vanish. I have other things planned, too, and could tell you what they are, but wouldn’t it be so much more fun to find out for yourself?

Meet the new blog; not at all the same as the old blog.

Respectfully dedicated to Mark B. Evans, editor of The Voice of Tucson.